Album-A-Day #5: Tarkus In Black Vinyl, Please 15 Feb 2019 This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as…
LEANN RIMES - "Can't Fight The Moonlight" 20 Jun 2015 “Same Old Brand New You” showed that the Max Martin style could be achieved on the cheap - but what happened if you went in the other direction? Plasticky British…
T.A.T.U. - "All The Things She Said" 22 Oct 2019 Nobody could claim that time and changing norms have rendered t.A.T.u. problematic; they were glaringly, undeniably skeevy from the off. Executive producer Ivan Shapovalov – who masterminded the duo’s anime…
PWC14: Group G Match 2 (Ghana, USA, Portugal, Germany) 13 Mar 2014 Group G's middle game sees Ghana (Jonathan Bogart) in front after narrowly beating the USA (The Lex) last time. Behind them come Portugal (Weej) and Germany (Tak) who will be…
RICKY MARTIN - "Livin' La Vida Loca" 11 Nov 2014 It’s a curious rule of the British public and charts that we don’t care much about Latin music – its rhythms and stars remain strange to us when we’ll embrace…
SHANKS AND BIGFOOT - "Sweet Like Chocolate" 24 Oct 2014 Seeds sown in London’s clubland bloom in the charts sooner or later – but sometimes there’s a particularly fine flowering, an alignment of pop and underground when the most beguiling…
BEYONCÉ - "Crazy In Love" 24 Jan 2020 History in the making,” says Jay-Z in the intro, and he’s been proven right. As I’ve said before, there’s a temptation with Beyoncé to treat her big moments as inevitable…
MANIC STREET PREACHERS - "The Masses Against The Classes" 1 Feb 2015 “All over the world I will back the masses against the classes” - William Ewart Gladstone. Hello, it’s us again. Welcome to Popular. Welcome to 21st century pop music, now…
About the Author
Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here
15 Aug 2006
The Notorious Bettie Page is a film about the good old days of porn. You know, when it wasn’t exploitative, and all the girls portrayed within were not only fun loving conspirators in an art project, but believed in Jeebus too. Most film about porn are about the good old days. Inside Deep Throat told […]
12 Feb 2002
There’s too much love to go around these days How much do you think I like music? Sometimes I get e-mails, angry about this or that, telling me I don’t like it at all. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Every now and then a poster pops up on our discussion board, I Love Music, and […]
15 Aug 2007
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the […]
30 Apr 2000
April 2000, Piccadilly The sun comes out over London and the Summer starts: everywhere you look you see people in love, snogging on the tubes and holding hands on the escalators so you can’t get past them. Baggy shorts and halter tops all over the place, kids sitting together on Eros and choking on the […]
10 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]
28 Jun 2013
We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll. We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have once described as Britpop. Tick all the ones you like and by science […]
13 Jul 2018
What if a World Cup lasted ALL YEAR? That’s the experiment we appear to be running with this year’s PWC, and a grand experiment it is too. Here we are with the fourth match, group C, which even features a team that is STILL IN the football tournament. France are one of the great exponents […]
1 Sep 2002
I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, […]
